Other data science & data engineering solutions are good but they can be expensive and we have found that some groups primarily use the open source functionality within these solutions. AWS EMR provides a nice open source service, is typically less expensive, but if you leave it on the price drop from the enterprise solutions may not be significant and EMR was not built to be a full time collaborative environment.
The above is not a criticism of the available solutions, as we have used many and are fans of some, but our experience is that many data science user groups would be best served with a solution that has all the data mining power of the above solutions, is easy to use, available full time, and at a price aligned to their needs. Over the years Optumine has built such a solution to use internally, and for use in client engagements, so we packaged and released it as Galadrome.
Contact us to find out more.